JP Morgan Health Reflections

Issue 58 l Eka’s Weekly Roundup (18 January 2024)

Jan 18, 2024

It’s been a week since JP's Health Conference, and with the dust settling, we wanted to take a look back at the main announcements.

There was a lot of talk around synthetic control arms for clinical trials, which is a market we’ve looked at throughout the course of 2024. The largest announcement (especially for the generalist crowd) was the Amazon/Omada partnership, which has the potential to upend health distribution in the United States. Finally we had to mention AI, and spotlight one of our portfolio companies Oxcan making inroads in early-stage cancer diagnostics.

Three things we learned at JP’s Health Conference 🗞️

1. Evidencing clinical trials is going to change

Qiagen, the German pharmaceutical company, announced that it planned to expand its AI and NLP solutions to develop regulatory-compliant secondary analysis solutions for sequencing analysis within clinical labs.

Taking a step back, AI has opened the door to the use of synthetic data as a substitute for placebo arms in drug trials, a necessity particularly for drugs with accelerated approvals facing challenges in recruiting participants for post-market studies and maintaining the integrity of placebo groups.

Medidata on Harvard Medical School

The main obstacle to widespread adoption of synthetic controls lies in the cautious stance of the FDA (see their guidance from Feb 2023). While certain segments of the agency support real-world evidence (RWE) and synthetic controls, there is a justified reluctance to fully embrace the approach without sufficient completed trials and acceptance by the agency. However, there have been notable successes, and ongoing trials may contribute to shifting the regulatory perspective.

Synthetic trial arms represent just one facet of RWE's applications. Improved algorithms and enhanced data quality are poised to revolutionize areas such as post-market safety monitoring, clinical trial recruitment, and site selection. Establishing trust in real-world data, with the implementation of appropriate safeguards, is crucial for bringing about a significant transformation in pharmaceutical R&D practices.

Companies to flag: R Grid, Lindus, Qureight, Quant Health, Presentient

2. Amazon continues its push in Consumer Health

Amazon announced a new partnership with Omada Health, introducing its Health Condition Programs. Amazon has now made several inroads into becoming a leading healthcare gateway and preferred distributor. It remains to be seen if the strategy regarding will go down the direct-to-consumer route, or a B2B employer-facing route.

Thinking more broadly, there has been continued coverage of the growing Consumer Health & Wellness market. McKinsey published an article on Wellness earlier this week showing interest-levels by Wellness area according to consumers.

McKinsey

The more interesting chart is this one. We’ve thought a lot about ‘clinical efficacy’ in consumer products and believe that this will be necessary going forward.

McKinsey

Companies to flag: Paired, Runna, Jude, Eight Sleep, Zoe

3. Health AI (beyond LLMs) attracts Tech Giants

Nvidia, a leading chip manufacturer, revealed a significant initiative in Generative AI (GenAI) focused on drug discovery working with Recursion and Amgen. CEO Jensen Huang and various Nvidia showed off their AI initiatives at the conference, underscoring their commitment to the field. Isomorphic Labs, an Alphabet spinoff, secured substantial contracts with Eli Lilly and Novartis for AI-driven drug exploration.

Nvidia

Zooming into oncology, there have been seismic shifts in cancer diagnostics using machine learning. For example Oxford Cancer Analytics (OXcan) has introduced a specialized Machine Learning pipeline maximizing the potential of liquid biopsy data, rendering big data clinically actionable. OXcan's patent filed ML approach doubled detection sensitivity using liquid biopsy data across 8 different cancers at the early stage. Additionally, it effectively distilled over a thousand biomarkers into a focused panel of 17-37, maintaining an impressive sensitivity of 92%. This targeted panel is crucial for creating a clinically actionable set of biomarkers for early cancer detection, streamlining the process from over a thousand biomarkers.

Companies to flag: OxCan, Flok, Isla, Isomorphic Labs